GenomeSpace Tools and Data Sources

ISAcreator

The open source ISA metadata tracking tools help to manage an increasingly diverse set of life science, environmental, and biomedical experiments that employ one or a combination of technologies.

Built around the Investigation (the project context), Study (a unit of research), and Assay (analytical measurement) general-purpose tabular (ISA-TAB) format, the ISA tools support description and enrichment of experimental metadata (i.e., sample characteristics, technology, measurement types, and sample-to-data relationships), to help with provenance tracking and encourage good data stewardship for optimal data sharing.

ISAcreator is a user-friendly editor that researchers can use to collect and curate experimental metadata, describing the experimental steps using community-defined minimum reporting requirements and ontologies where possible.

ISAcreator supports, among other things:

Collecting and curating the experimental metadata in a spreadsheet-like form. Basic spreadsheet functionality has been augmented with features such as support for ontology annotation, an experimental design wizard, and, among other things, facilities to import existing tabular data.

Validating the metadata against configuration files (templates), which specify the fields and ontology terms (and can be created with the ISAconfigurator tool).

Editing/converting files to major submission formats for a variety of international public repositories (ENA/SRA, Metabolights, Pride, ArrayExpress)

ISA-TAB formatted datasets are then amenable to be used by the rest of the ISA software suite to: